Asda takes home the award for the 2013 Ashton Partnership Product Innovation of the Year for its Fish Made Simple initiative.

The Fish Made Simple initiative was rolled out to 302 Asda stores nationwide last year

All good innovations should fulfil a customer need, but few manage to tackle three of them at once. Asda’s Fish Made Simple initiative tapped into the consumer’s desire for convenient, versatile and healthier food choices and set about serving all three.

Customers can choose from a selection of 20 different varieties of seafood including salmon, cod, monkfish, sea bass and scallops, and from different options such as whole or filleted. Then, with the help of trained counter staff, they can choose a sauce, marinade, flavoured butter or crumb topping to complement their choice, selecting from flavours such as teriyaki, Thai sauce, Cajun crumbs, and lemon and pepper butter.

Finally, they choose a method of cooking - either microwave bag, oven bag or BBQ foil tray. The upshot is that the trepidation and messiness sometimes associated with cooking seafood is removed and customers also get to take home a sauce that is complementary in both texture and flavour.

The judges praised the simplicity of the idea and its strong execution. “Fish Made Simple is very clever because, as a rule, people just aren’t comfortable cooking fish,” says one.

Asda says the range has revolutionised seafood counters by giving consumers who feel uncomfortable cooking seafood - due to lack of knowledge - the confidence to prepare it in more than 100 ways. And with each seafood dish in the range priced £2.28 to £2.38, Asda has stuck to its ‘everyday low price’ promise.

The innovation also has consumer health at its core, a fact acknowledged by one of the judges who comments: “It’s a really nice way of encouraging Asda’s shopper demographic to eat healthier food.”

Fresh thinking on fish at Asda

Fresh thinking on fish at Asda

Fish Made Simple launched in 302 stores nationwide in March 2012 as part of Asda’s plan to invest in improving its fresh food offering. The counters were developed after research showed that less than half of UK consumers eat fresh seafood more than once a week while a fifth never buy fresh seafood at all because they are put off by the smell and lack the confidence to prepare it.

The launch was supported by a bespoke point of sale plan aimed at highlighting the quality, freshness, simplicity and convenience of the offer, a sampling programme that allowed customers to try seafood and sauce combinations in-store and a media campaign including TV, social and in-store leaflets.

Since the launch of Fish Made Simple, Asda says it has made gains in both share and value of own-label seafood sales. Also, just as importantly, feedback from customers has been extremely positive, with many coming back time and again to try new combinations.

Since launching, Asda has introduced Alaska pollock and hake to its counters as more sustainable alternatives to cod and haddock. Hake and pollock are on the Marine Stewardship Council’s Fish to Eat list of sustainable species, adding yet another dimension to the Fish Made Simple proposition. “TV chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have done wonders for championing lesser-known species, but that doesn’t help shoppers if they can’t get their hands on it to try at home,” says Jill Skipsey, fish counter buyer at Asda.

The Ashton Partnership

The Ashton Partnership is a growing boutique executive search firm with experience in developed, emerging and frontier markets. Our firm helps businesses identify and acquire global talent to support profitable growth. Our partners, both international and multilingual, have experience of board- and executive-level appointments across consumer, retail, digital commerce, energy and natural resources, financial services, technology and media. The Ashton Partnership recognises that future success will be delivered by innovative business models, enabled by rapidly developing technologies, often achieved in unfamiliar regions and financed by new sources of capital. Boards must be equipped to succeed in these challenging conditions, under relentless external scrutiny. Our UK experience ranges from FTSE 100 to AIM as well as privately held and PE-backed businesses.

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